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Saturday, December 31, 2011

As I’ve written about before, America’s election season degrades mainstream political discourse even beyond its usual lowly state. The worst attributes of our political culture — obsession with trivialities, the dominance of horserace “reporting,” and mindless partisan loyalties — become more pronounced than ever. Meanwhile, the actually consequential acts of the U.S. Government and the permanent power factions that control it — covert endless wars, consolidation of unchecked power, the rapid growth of the Surveillance State and the secrecy regime, massive inequalities in the legal system, continuous transfers of wealth from the disappearing middle class to large corporate conglomerates — drone on with even less attention paid than usual.

Because most of those policies are fully bipartisan in nature, the election season — in which only issues that bestow partisan advantage receive attention — places them even further outside the realm of mainstream debate and scrutiny. For that reason, America’s elections ironically serve to obsfuscate political reality even more than it usually is.

This would all be bad enough if “election season” were confined to a few months the way it is in most civilized countries. But in America, the fixation on presidential elections takes hold at least eighteen months before the actual election occurs, which means that more than 1/3 of a President’s term is conducted in the midst of (and is obscured by) the petty circus distractions of The Campaign. Thus, an unauthorized, potentially devastating covert war — both hot and cold — against Iran can be waged with virtually no debate, just as government control over the Internet can be inexorably advanced, because TV political shows are busy chattering away about Michele Bachmann’s latest gaffe and minute changes in Rick Perry’s polling numbers.

Then there’s the full-scale sacrifice of intellectual honesty and political independence at the altar of tongue-wagging partisan loyalty. The very same people who in 2004 wildly cheered John Kerry — husband of the billionaire heiress-widow Teresa Heinz Kerry — spent all of 2008 mocking John McCain’s wealthy life courtesy of his millionaire heiress wife and will spend 2012 depicting Mitt Romney’s wealth as proof of his insularity; conversely, the same people who relentlessly mocked Kerry in 2004 as a kept girly-man and gigolo for living off his wife’s wealth spent 2008 venerating McCain as the Paragon of Manly Honor.

That combat experience is an important presidential trait was insisted upon in 2004 by the very same people who vehemently denied it in 2008, and vice-versa. Long-time associations with controversial figures and inflammatory statements from decades ago either matter or they don’t depending on whom it hurts, etc. etc. During election season, even the pretense of consistency is proudly dispensed with; listening to these empty electioneering screeching matches for any period of time can generate the desire to jump off the nearest bridge to escape it.

Then there’s the inability and/or refusal to recognize that a political discussion might exist independent of the Red v. Blue Cage Match. Thus, any critique of the President’s exercise of vast power (an adversarial check on which our political system depends) immediately prompts bafflement (I don’t understand the point: would Rick Perry be any better?) or grievance (you’re helping Mitt Romney by talking about this!!). The premise takes hold for a full 18 months — increasing each day in intensity until Election Day — that every discussion of the President’s actions must be driven solely by one’s preference for election outcomes (if you support the President’s re-election, then why criticize him?).

Worse still is the embrace of George W. Bush’s with-us-or-against-us mentality as the prism through which all political discussions are filtered. It’s literally impossible to discuss any of the candidates’ positions without having the simple-minded — who see all political issues exclusively as a Manichean struggle between the Big Bad Democrats and Good Kind Republicans or vice-versa — misapprehend “I agree with Candidate X’s position on Y” as “I support Candidate X for President” or “I disagree with Candidate X’s position on Y” as “I oppose Candidate X for President.” Even worse are the lying partisan enforcers who, like the Inquisitor Generals searching for any inkling of heresy, purposely distort any discrete praise for the Enemy as a general endorsement.

So potent is this poison that no inoculation against it exists. No matter how expressly you repudiate the distortions in advance, they will freely flow. Hence: I’m about to discuss the candidacies of Barack Obama and Ron Paul, and no matter how many times I say that I am not “endorsing” or expressing supporting for anyone’s candidacy, the simple-minded Manicheans and the lying partisan enforcers will claim the opposite. But since it’s always inadvisable to refrain from expressing ideas in deference to the confusion and deceit of the lowest elements, I’m going to proceed to make a couple of important points about both candidacies even knowing in advance how wildly they will be distorted.

The Ron Paul candidacy, for so many reasons, spawns pervasive political confusion — both unintended and deliberate. Yesterday, The Nation‘s long-time liberal publisher, Katrina vanden Heuvel, wrote this on Twitter:

That’s fairly remarkable: here’s the Publisher of The Nation praising Ron Paul not on ancillary political topics but central ones (“ending preemptive wars & challenging bipartisan elite consensus” on foreign policy), and going even further and expressing general happiness that he’s in the presidential race. Despite this observation, Katrina vanden Heuvel — needless to say — does not support and will never vote for Ron Paul (indeed, in subsequent tweets, she condemned his newsletters as “despicable”). But the point that she’s making is important, if not too subtle for the with-us-or-against-us ethos that dominates the protracted presidential campaign: even though I don’t support him for President, Ron Paul is the only major candidate from either party advocating crucial views on vital issues that need to be heard, and so his candidacy generates important benefits.

Whatever else one wants to say, it is indisputably true that Ron Paul is the only political figure with any sort of a national platform — certainly the only major presidential candidate in either party — who advocates policy views on issues that liberals and progressives have long flamboyantly claimed are both compelling and crucial. The converse is equally true: the candidate supported by liberals and progressives and for whom most will vote — Barack Obama — advocates views on these issues (indeed, has taken action on these issues) that liberals and progressives have long claimed to find repellent, even evil.

As Matt Stoller argued in a genuinely brilliant essay on the history of progressivism and the Democratic Party which I cannot recommend highly enough: “the anger [Paul] inspires comes not from his positions, but from the tensions that modern American liberals bear within their own worldview.” Ron Paul’s candidacy is a mirror held up in front of the face of America’s Democratic Party and its progressive wing, and the image that is reflected is an ugly one; more to the point, it’s one they do not want to see because it so violently conflicts with their desired self-perception.

The thing I loathe most about election season is reflected in the central fallacy that drives progressive discussion the minute “Ron Paul” is mentioned. As soon as his candidacy is discussed, progressives will reflexively point to a slew of positions he holds that are anathema to liberalism and odious in their own right and then say: how can you support someone who holds this awful, destructive position? The premise here — the game that’s being played — is that if you can identify some heinous views that a certain candidate holds, then it means they are beyond the pale, that no Decent Person should even consider praising any part of their candidacy.

The fallacy in this reasoning is glaring. The candidate supported by progressives — President Obama — himself holds heinous views on a slew of critical issues and himself has done heinous things with the power he has been vested. He has slaughtered civilians — Muslim children by the dozens — not once or twice, but continuously in numerous nations with drones, cluster bombs and other forms of attack. He has sought to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs. He has institutionalized the power of Presidents — in secret and with no checks — to target American citizens for assassination-by-CIA, far from any battlefield. He has waged an unprecedented war against whistleblowers, the protection of which was once a liberal shibboleth. He rendered permanently irrelevant the War Powers Resolution, a crown jewel in the list of post-Vietnam liberal accomplishments, and thus enshrined the power of Presidents to wage war even in the face of a Congressional vote against it. His obsession with secrecy is so extreme that it has become darkly laughable in its manifestations, and he even worked to amend the Freedom of Information Act (another crown jewel of liberal legislative successes) when compliance became inconvenient.

He has entrenched for a generation the once-reviled, once-radical Bush/Cheney Terrorism powers of indefinite detention, military commissions, and the state secret privilege as a weapon to immunize political leaders from the rule of law. He has shielded Bush era criminals from every last form of accountability. He has vigorously prosecuted the cruel and supremely racist War on Drugs, including those parts he vowed during the campaign to relinquish — a war which devastates minority communities and encages and converts into felons huge numbers of minority youth for no good reason. He has empowered thieving bankers through the Wall Street bailout, Fed secrecy, efforts to shield mortgage defrauders from prosecution, and the appointment of an endless roster of former Goldman, Sachs executives and lobbyists. He’s brought the nation to a full-on Cold War and a covert hot war with Iran, on the brink of far greater hostilities. He has made the U.S. as subservient as ever to the destructive agenda of the right-wing Israeli government. His support for some of the Arab world’s most repressive regimes is as strong as ever.

Most of all, America’s National Security State, its Surveillance State, and its posture of endless war is more robust than ever before. The nation suffers from what National Journal‘s Michael Hirsh just christened “Obama’s Romance with the CIA.” He has created what The Washington Post just dubbed “a vast drone/killing operation,” all behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy and without a shred of oversight. Obama’s steadfast devotion to what Dana Priest and William Arkin called “Top Secret America” has severe domestic repercussions as well, building up vast debt and deficits in the name of militarism that create the pretext for the “austerity” measures which the Washington class (including Obama) is plotting to impose on America’s middle and lower classes.

The simple fact is that progressives are supporting a candidate for President who has done all of that — things liberalism has long held to be pernicious. I know it’s annoying and miserable to hear. Progressives like to think of themselves as the faction that stands for peace, opposes wars, believes in due process and civil liberties, distrusts the military-industrial complex, supports candidates who are devoted to individual rights, transparency and economic equality. All of these facts — like the history laid out by Stoller in that essay — negate that desired self-perception. These facts demonstrate that the leader progressives have empowered and will empower again has worked in direct opposition to those values and engaged in conduct that is nothing short of horrific. So there is an eagerness to avoid hearing about them, to pretend they don’t exist. And there’s a corresponding hostility toward those who point them out, who insist that they not be ignored.

The parallel reality — the undeniable fact — is that all of these listed heinous views and actions from Barack Obama have been vehemently opposed and condemned by Ron Paul: and among the major GOP candidates, only by Ron Paul. For that reason, Paul’s candidacy forces progressives to face the hideous positions and actions of their candidate, of the person they want to empower for another four years. If Paul were not in the race or were not receiving attention, none of these issues would receive any attention because all the other major GOP candidates either agree with Obama on these matters or hold even worse views.

Progressives would feel much better about themselves, their Party and their candidate if they only had to oppose, say, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann. That’s because the standard GOP candidate agrees with Obama on many of these issues and is even worse on these others, so progressives can feel good about themselves for supporting Obama: his right-wing opponent is a warmonger, a servant to Wall Street, a neocon, a devotee of harsh and racist criminal justice policies, etc. etc. Paul scrambles the comfortable ideological and partisan categories and forces progressives to confront and account for the policies they are working to protect. His nomination would mean that it is the Republican candidate — not the Democrat — who would be the anti-war, pro-due-process, pro-transparency, anti-Fed, anti-Wall-Street-bailout, anti-Drug-War advocate (which is why some neocons are expressly arguing they’d vote for Obama over Paul). Is it really hard to see why Democrats hate his candidacy and anyone who touts its benefits?

It’s perfectly rational and reasonable for progressives to decide that the evils of their candidate are outweighed by the evils of the GOP candidate, whether Ron Paul or anyone else. An honest line of reasoning in this regard would go as follows:

Yes, I’m willing to continue to have Muslim children slaughtered by covert drones and cluster bombs, and America’s minorities imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason, and the CIA able to run rampant with no checks or transparency, and privacy eroded further by the unchecked Surveillance State, and American citizens targeted by the President for assassination with no due process, and whistleblowers threatened with life imprisonment for “espionage,” and the Fed able to dole out trillions to bankers in secret, and a substantially higher risk of war with Iran (fought by the U.S. or by Israel with U.S. support) in exchange for less severe cuts to Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, the preservation of the Education and Energy Departments, more stringent environmental regulations, broader health care coverage, defense of reproductive rights for women, stronger enforcement of civil rights for America’s minorities, a President with no associations with racist views in a newsletter, and a more progressive Supreme Court.

Without my adopting it, that is at least an honest, candid, and rational way to defend one’s choice. It is the classic lesser-of-two-evils rationale, the key being that it explicitly recognizes that both sides are “evil”: meaning it is not a Good v. Evil contest but a More Evil v. Less Evil contest. But that is not the discussion that takes place because few progressives want to acknowledge that the candidate they are supporting — again — is someone who will continue to do these evil things with their blessing. Instead, we hear only a dishonest one-sided argument that emphasizes Paul’s evils while ignoring Obama’s (progressives frequently ask: how can any progressive consider an anti-choice candidate but don’t ask themselves: how can any progressive support a child-killing, secrecy-obsessed, whistleblower-persecuting Drug Warrior?).

Paul’s candidacy forces those truths about the Democratic Party to be confronted. More important — way more important — is that, as vanden Heuvel pointed out, he forces into the mainstream political discourse vital ideas that are otherwise completely excluded given that they are at odds with the bipartisan consensus.

There are very few political priorities, if there are any, more imperative than having an actual debate on issues of America’s imperialism; the suffocating secrecy of its government; the destruction of civil liberties which uniquely targets Muslims, including American Muslims; the corrupt role of the Fed; corporate control of government institutions by the nation’s oligarchs; its destructive blind support for Israel, and its failed and sadistic Drug War. More than anything, it’s crucial that choice be given to the electorate by subverting the two parties’ full-scale embrace of these hideous programs.

I wish there were someone who did not have Ron Paul’s substantial baggage to achieve this. Before Paul announced his candidacy, I expressed hope in an Out Magazine profile that Gary Johnson would run for President and be the standard-bearer for these views, in the process scrambling bipartisan stasis on these questions. I did that not because I was endorsing his candidacy (as some low-level Democratic Party operative dishonestly tried to claim), but because, as a popular two-term Governor of New Mexico free of Paul’s disturbing history and associations, he seemed to me well-suited to force these debates to be had. But alas, Paul decided to run again, and Johnson — for reasons still very unclear — was forcibly excluded from media debates and rendered a non-person. Since then, Paul’s handling of the very legitimate questions surrounding those rancid newsletters has been disappointing in the extreme, and that has only served to obscure these vital debates and severely dilute the discourse-enhancing benefits of his candidacy.

* * * * *

Still, for better or worse, Paul — alone among the national figures in both parties — is able and willing to advocate views that Americans urgently need to hear. That he is doing so within the Republican Party makes it all the more significant. This is why Paul has been the chosen ally of key liberal House members such as Alan Grayson (on Fed transparency and corruption), Barney Frank (to arrest the excesses of the Drug War) and Dennis Kucinich (on a wide array of foreign policy and civil liberties issues). Just judge for yourself: consider some of what Ron Paul is advocating on vital issues — not secondary issues, but ones progressives have long insisted are paramount — and ask how else these debates will be had and who else will advocate these views:

Endless War and Terrorism

This entire four-minute Cenk Uygur discussion from last week about Paul’s candidacy is worthwhile, but if nothing else, watch the amazing ad about American wars and Terrorism from Ron Paul’s campaign which Cenk features at the 2:50 mark:

How the Globalists Have Destroyed Free Markets to Introduce the New World Order

Andrew @ The Globalist Report

The lies and deception of this imaginative notion that we live and function in a free market is the biggest fallacy ever conceived. What the general public don’t understand is that the decisions they make on a daily basis have been predetermined by two mitigating factors. The trail of deceit, lies and misinformation that the Globalists and Elite have perpetrated is astonishing.

We are all taught that Education will set you free. This statement would be true if the Globalists and Elite hadn’t infiltrated our education institutions by sowing the seeds of deceit when it comes to educating our youth and future leaders about economics and how markets work.

The following are two critical lies the public have been told that influence the decisions they make and how they live their lives.

Lie #1: The Government needs to make decisions for us because we can’t

The first time anyone is ever introduced to the principles of economics is usually via the Keynesian School of Economics. In summary, Keynesian Economics proposes that the private sector does not have the inherent capacity to deliver effective macroeconomic decisions. Because believers of Keynesian Economics do not believe that the decisions the private sector makes will lead to economically viable outcomes, they usually propose that the public sector (Government) should be making policy that would influence market outcomes. So basically, proponents of Keynesian Economics want the government to interfere with the decisions that you make.

This disgusting notion that we need our beloved and glorious Government to make decisions for us has actually convinced people that they themselves can’t make simple economic decisions by themselves.

Lie #2 – The cost of money and money supply is determined by the market

This is the most serious and disturbing lie I have ever heard. The general public actually believe that the cost of money is derived naturally by the market and It is the market that determines how much we pay for the items we purchases on a daily basis. WRONG!!!

The cost of money is not determined by the market, but instead it is determined by the Globalists, the Elite and Government. How? Well, it all starts with Central Banks and the decisions these corrupt institutions make. Below, you will find a very simple chart that describes how Central Banks force you to make everyday decisions.

This simple diagram is only one variation of what happens when Central Banks meddle with interest rates. If you are interested in learning how interest rates should be derived (via free market methods), then a simple Google search would be a great start (search for ‘Austrian School of Economics’)

Also, another important note you must take from the workflow above is that by appointing a private individual to somehow workout what the interest rates should be lead’s to people preceding and or not proceeding with decisions they may or may not take. This notion is especially dangerous when interest rates are set at the incorrect level. It is common knowledge that the great depression of the 1930’s was caused by the Federal Reserve incorrectly setting interest rates of which in turn sent the wrong signal to the market.

The first lie, ‘the Government needs to make decisions for us because we can’t’ and second lie ‘the cost money and money supply is determined by the market’ have all been absorbed by the public and believed.

Based on these two simple fallacies, to conclude I would like to propose a very simple new definition of what the New World Order is all about. The New World Order is the establishment of a Global Government that will make decisions based around how the “Market” should function to force you into making everyday decisions that will only benefit the Globalists, Elite and Private International Financiers.

There is a man in the White House with a wife and two daughters. We see him getting on and off Air Force One or a big presidential helicopter. He waves at people. He wears a nice suit and looks neat and trim. We see him sauntering up to a podium to say a few words. Nothing he says seems to be of any importance. He has a Press Secretary who speaks for him at the daily press briefing.

The reporters ask real questions and receive word-shadows for answers.

When he speaks to American soldiers or lays a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier he is like a robot who doesn’t believe what he says. He’s been programmed like a mechanical entity. He mouths 19th century platitudes about the redistribution of wealth or the class struggle. There is nothing there. There is no is. There is no soul. There is just an empty suit.

Like a mannequin he wears his Brooks Brothers suits well. When he plays golf he wears the regulation shorts, Polo shirt, and golf shoes. He plays mechanically. He seems to actually like golf, but Marxists don’t play golf. None of the Soviet leaders played golf. Terrorists don’t play golf. If they did, they wouldn’t be terrorists.

When the Phantom plays golf, he does it to forget that he is a phantom, a ghost, a soulless entity. That’s why he escapes to fast-food hamburger restaurants, so that he can feel like a human being.

He smiles when the server asks if he wants that burger with fries. Such words are music to his big ears. They confirm that he is a living entity.

On special occasions the Phantom will speak to Congress and spend about an hour reading a speech on teleprompters. During one of his speeches, he scolded the Supreme Court judges seated before him for making a decision he did not approve of. That was the only sign of life during the speech. The rest was the usual forgettable babble.

In a recent speech in Ossawatomie, Kansas, the Phantom raised Theodore Roosevelt from the dead and told the American people that what was needed was what TR advocated in 1910. The Phantom is now capable of raising the dead and promoting a dead philosophy of government. He seems to be comfortable with the dead, while living Americans watch and wait. What are they waiting for? A removal of the dummy from the haunted White House and for a live human being to become leader of the United States.

The Phantom President likes to remind Americans that their country is no more special than Kenya or Pakistan. Americans are a mob of selfish people who have enriched themselves by stealing from poor nations. Americans need to pay more for their energy. They need to suffer more and pay higher taxes. The rich are the enemies of the poor and need to pay their fair share. “Fair share” is one of the dummy’s favorite phrases. He utters it at every chance he gets. He doesn’t know what it means, since the rich pay most of the taxes on incomes in this country, whereas the poor only pay sales taxes.

The Phantom President loves food stamps for more and more people, because they will love him the way the North Koreans loved Kim Jong-il and shed shattering, hysterical tears when he died. The Phantom wants to be remembered as the generous god of bounty and bailouts. He wants to be remembered as the President who raised the national debt to such unsustainable levels that it may all come crashing down on the heads of the American people who deserve to know what it’s like to be bankrupt.

The Phantom enjoys his travels aboard Air Force One. There he is treated like Kim Jong-il. He gets the kind of food he likes. Steaks cooked to perfection. The staff caters to every wish a phantom can have. That is why he likes the long trips, to Australia and China, so that he can rule like an emperor without any complaints from Republicans. Air Force One is even better than North Korea. There is no rationing on Air Force One. There is only luxury and pleasure, and any movie he wishes to see.

The Phantom President also claims that he is a man of peace. He has ended the war in Iraq by withdrawing all of our forces, which is what he promised to do and what all of the warring parties were waiting for. So now the civil war can really begin between the Sunnis and the Shia, with Iran taking the side of the Shia, now that the secular Sunni Saddam Hussein is no longer around to stop them. And he will do the same in Afghanistan. But it will take a little longer.

He wants peace, sweetness and light, to prevail between Israel and the Palestinians. But the ghost has little power to impose his will. A Phantom doesn’t have much power to do much of anything on the international scene. The Israelis see him as a phantom except in the Security Council of the United Nations, while the Palestinians can’t make heads or tails of him. He cannot even convince the Iranians to give up their quest for nuclear weapons. It appears that the Phantom is impotent because his programming has not provided him with a plan for action.

The Phantom likes to borrow money to pay for all of the things that government now does. He has no limits on how much we must borrow, for to him a government budget has no meaning. He will not let a meaningless budget limit his desire to spend. He is only capable of spending money, and the more money he can cajole the American people to give him, the more he will spend. He is programmed to spend as much money as possible. He likes dealing in trillions because since he has the mind of a computer, trillions can be easily handled with no complaints from the computer. Americans who want to limit his spending are bad people. They refuse to understand how much this Phantom President loves to spend.

The Phantom is also interested in your health, and he spent his first months in office contriving the most expensive and tyrannical healthcare program in American history. He wants to know everything about you, what you eat, whether you are fat or thin, how much you weigh, what ails you, whether or not you are happy or depressed, how much you earn, whether or not you smoke or drink, how old you are, so that he can determine whether or not you are eligible for expensive medical treatment or should be encouraged to die instead of costing the government too much money. He will even help you commit suicide, if that is your patriotic wish. The Phantom President only wishes the best for his subjects. That’s why he’s so worried about your health. Can’t you appreciate what the Phantom wants for your own good? Don’t you realize that his mechanical heart beats for your benefit?

The Phantom President is a creature of the Shadow Party, a political haunted house inhabited by masked individuals pretending to be what they aren’t. Their leader is himself a shadow, flitting about the world stage, with fantasies of messianic power. He topples leaders in small countries where it only takes a few million to dazzle the eyes of the ambitious. It is his personal game of international chess that invigorates his ego but is never fully satisfied. That’s why he wants to control and shape the future of the United States. That would really satisfy his ego. But his Phantom President has hit a wall of opposition, and his foundations and organizations are spinning into irrelevance.

Some people complain that the Phantom President is not a leader. They want him to lead. But he never intended to lead. He has been programmed to be the President of retreat, retreat from greatness to mediocrity, from optimism to pessimism, from prosperity to recession, from military strength to military impotence.

The Phantom President has about a year to get done what he was programmed to do: reduce America to second-rate status in the world. That’s the least that the Big Ego in the shadow hoped his dummy-in-chief could achieve. But even the emperor of the Shadow Party can’t get everything he wants. Money can buy just about anything, but it cannot buy the hearts and minds of true Americans who venerate George Washington, the U.S. Constitution, and the Declaration of Independence. It cannot buy the hearts and minds of those who believe in individual freedom and the greatness of America’s future. Hopefully, the Phantom President will dissolve in November 2012 and be reconstituted as a private citizen ready to give speeches at $50,000 a shot. And he will solicit funds to build his presidential library — his House of Lies — in Honolulu.

With 2011 coming to a close and gold and silver stabilizing after the recent smash, today King World News interviewed acclaimed money manager Stephen Leeb, Chairman & Chief Investment Officer of Leeb Capital Management. KWN wanted to get his outlook for 2012 and thoughts on the recent takedown in the metals. When asked about the action in gold, Leeb responded, “The fact that gold has gone down, in the face of what should be good news, has really spooked people. But there are a lot of reasons you can have corrections, even the strongest markets have corrections. This could have started because Paulson sold a big chunk of his GLD.”

Stephen Leeb continues:

“Why did he (Paulson) sell GLD? Because he bet a lot on banks and banks lost 25% or 30% in value. There may have been other hedge funds in the same position. To put this correction in perspective, in 2008 gold went down, from top to bottom, by 34%. Most of that decline followed Bear Stearns. It reflected a lack of liquidity in the system.

The point I’m making is these kind of corrections are just that, corrections. This is hard to believe, but gold today, it’s yearly average is 20% higher than the yearly average in 2010. That’s a remarkable move. Gold had a great year.

All of the sudden you have an asset that’s been in an eleven year bull market and everybody is bearish on it. It’s quite remarkable when you think about it.

I just want to add that we are now shutting down refineries in this country because they are no longer profitable.....

“That means you could have a floor, not a ceiling, but a floor of $4 per gallon of gasoline this summer.

If Europe ever does get its act together we could see crude move to $120 to $130 a barrel. That would mean $5 a gallon gasoline at the pump. This is going to be a massive tax on consumers for which the government gets no benefit.

It’s going to slow down the economy and at the same time it will juice up inflation. This means the Fed is not going to risk another depression so they may loosen in the face of inflation going up. If that happens, not that gold would even need it, but this would take gold’s uptrend and add multiple turbo-boosters to it.

I’ll give you my target for gold at the end of 2012, it’s going to be trading somewhere between $2,500 and $3,000. This correction, in other words, is a non-event. The rubber band analogy applies here, for every dollar down on gold, it will mean an extra dollar on the upside when we get the reversal.

It’s so important for investors that are not seasoned, it’s so important not to get shaken out of your position here. And if you have extra money on the side, this is a great buying opportunity.

Segueing into silver, silver is even better here. The Chinese have started to stockpile silver, sort of hidden in an announcement they made the other day. They are not going to export any silver. China is not going to export, according to their latest announcement, not even one ounce of silver.

So, if I were to target silver for the end of 2012, I’m going to be very, very conservative and say silver will finish 2012 at $60. It’s going to make new all-time highs.”

30 Statistics That Show That The Middle Class Is Dying Right In Front Of Our Eyes As We Enter 2012
Once upon a time, the United States had the largest and most vibrant middle class that the world has ever seen. Unfortunately, that is rapidly changing. The statistics that you are about to read prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the U.S. middle class is dying right in front of our eyes as we enter 2012. The decline of the middle class is not something that has happened all of a sudden. Rather, there has been a relentless grinding down of the middle class over the last several decades. Millions of our jobs have been shipped overseas, the rate of inflation has far outpaced the rate that our wages have grown, and overwhelming debt has choked the financial life out of millions of American families. Every single day, more Americans fall out of the middle class and into poverty. In fact, more Americans fell into poverty last year than has ever been recorded before. The number of middle class jobs and middle class neighborhoods continues to decline at a staggering pace. As I have written about previously, America as a whole is getting poorer as a nation, and as this happens wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated at the very top of the income scale. This is not how capitalism is supposed to work, and it is not good for America.

Today I went over to Safeway and I was absolutely appalled at the prices. I honestly don't know how most families make it these days. I ended up paying over 140 dollars for about two-thirds of a cart of food. That was after I "saved" 67 dollars on sale items.

When the cost of the basic things that we need - housing, food, gas, electricity - go up faster than our incomes do, that means that we are getting poorer.

Sadly, if you look at the long-term numbers, some very clear negative trends emerge....

-The number of good jobs continues to decrease.

-The rate of inflation continues to outpace the rate that our wages are going up.

-American consumers are going into almost unbelievable amounts of debt.

-The number of Americans that are considered to be "poor" continues to grow.

-The number of Americans that are forced to turn to the government for financial assistance continues to go up.

After you read the information below, it should become abundantly clear that the U.S. middle class is in a whole heap of trouble.

The following are 30 statistics that show that the middle class is dying right in front of our eyes as we enter 2012....

#1 Today, only 55.3 percent of all Americans between the ages of 16 and 29 have jobs.

#2 In the United States today, there are 240 million working age people. Only about 140 million of them are working.

#3 According to CareerBuilder, only 23 percent of American companies plan to hire more employees in 2012.

#4 Since the year 2000, the United States has lost 10% of its middle class jobs. In the year 2000 there were about 72 million middle class jobs in the United States but today there are only about 65 million middle class jobs.

#5 According to the New York Times, approximately 100 million Americans are either living in poverty or in "the fretful zone just above it".

#6 According to that same article in the New York Times, 34 percent of all elderly Americans are living in poverty or "near poverty", and 39 percent of all children in America are living in poverty or "near poverty".

#7 In 1984, the median net worth of households led by someone 65 or older was 10 times larger than the median net worth of households led by someone 35 or younger. Today, the median net worth of households led by someone 65 or older is 47 times larger than the median net worth of households led by someone 35 or younger.

#8 Since the year 2000, incomes for U.S. households led by someone between the ages of 25 and 34 have fallen by about 12 percent after you adjust for inflation.

#9 The total value of household real estate in the U.S. has declined from $22.7 trillion in 2006 to $16.2 trillion today. Most of that wealth has been lost by the middle class.

#10 Many formerly great manufacturing cities are turning into ghost towns. Since 1950, the population of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has declined by more than 50 percent. In Dayton, Ohio 18.9 percent of all houses now stand empty.

#11 Since 1971, consumer debt in the United States has increased by a whopping 1700%.

#12 The number of pages of federal tax rules and regulations has increased by 18,000% since 1913. The wealthy know how to avoid taxes, but most of those in the middle class do not.

#13 The number of Americans that fell into poverty (2.6 million) set a new all-time record last year and extreme poverty (6.7%) is at the highest level ever measured in the United States.

#14 According to one study, between 1969 and 2009 the median wages earned by American men between the ages of 30 and 50 dropped by 27 percent after you account for inflation.

#15 According to U.S. Representative Betty Sutton, America has lost an average of 15 manufacturing facilities a day over the last 10 years. During 2010 it got even worse. Last year, an average of 23 manufacturing facilities a day shut down in the United States.

#16 Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs. Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs.

#17 Most Americans are scratching and clawing and doing whatever they can to make a living these days. Half of all American workers now earn $505 or less per week.

#18 Food prices continue to rise at a very brisk pace. The price of beef is up 9.8% over the past year, the price of eggs is up 10.2% over the past year and the price of potatoes is up 12% over the past year.

#19 Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.

#20 The average American household will have spent a staggering $4,155 on gasoline by the end of 2011.

#21 If inflation was measured the exact same way that it was measured back in 1980, the rate of inflation in the United States would be well over 10 percent.

#22 If the number of Americans considered to be "looking for work" was the same today as it was back in 2007, the "official" unemployment rate put out by the U.S. government would be up to 11 percent.

#23 According to the Student Loan Debt Clock, total student loan debt in the United States will surpass the 1 trillion dollar mark at some point in 2012. Most of that debt is owed by members of the middle class.

#24 Incredibly, more than one out of every seven Americans is on food stamps and one out of every four American children is on food stamps at this point.

#25 Since Barack Obama took office, the number of Americans on food stamps has increased by 14.3 million.

#26 In 2010, 42 percent of all single mothers in the United States were on food stamps.

#27 In 1970, 65 percent of all Americans lived in "middle class neighborhoods". By 2007, only 44 percent of all Americans lived in "middle class neighborhoods".

#28 According to a recent report produced by Pew Charitable Trusts, approximately one out of every three Americans that grew up in a middle class household has slipped down the income ladder.

#29 In the United States today, the wealthiest one percent of all Americans have a greater net worth than the bottom 90 percent combined.

#30 The poorest 50 percent of all Americans now collectively own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States.

Sadly, this article could have been much, much longer. There are so many other statistics about the middle class that could have been included.

For even more insane economic numbers that show just how dramatically the U.S. economy is declining, just check out this article: "50 Economic Numbers From 2011 That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe".

What is even more frightening is that this is about as good as things are going to get.

We have already had "the economic recovery", such as it was.

Now we are heading for another major financial crisis. Just like back in 2008, the entire world is going to feel the pain.

But we never recovered from the last financial crisis. We are like a boxer that is not ready to handle another blow.

And who is going to get hurt the most? It will be those at the bottom of the food chain of course. Tens of millions of Americans that are living in poverty will experience a massive amount of pain, and millions more Americans will fall out of the middle class and will join them.

If you have a good job, do your best to hang on to it. If you don't have a job, do your best to get one while you still can. Jobs will become very precious in the years ahead.

But also try to do what you can to become less dependent on the system. Almost anyone can find ways to make some extra money on the side. Yes, it will likely cut into your television time. If someday you were to lose your job you don't want to be left with zero income.

Right now, the U.S. economy is slowly dying and as time goes by the number of middle class Americans it will be able to support will continue to decrease.

Yes, it is like a perverse game of musical chairs, but this is where we are at.

I encourage all of you to think about how you plan to make it through the collapse that is ahead.

Sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that everything is going to be okay is not going to help anyone.

But if we all start planning for the storm that is ahead, and if we get others around us to wake up as well, that is going to do a great deal of good in the long run.

The publisher of the New Hampshire Union Leader said that “Ron Paul is a dangerous man.”

He’s right, and he’s wrong. Ron Paul is dangerous, but in the same way the American founding fathers were dangerous. He is an incorruptible, tenacious, and principled fighter in freedom’s corner. The thugs and tyrants in Washington are right to fear him and call him dangerous.

Peace and freedom are dangerous notions to the war criminals in Washington and Tel Aviv, and to the media maggots who shamelessly defend them in the establishment media. According to these undeclared enemies of America and freedom, we must all accept endless war and permanent slavery like slaves.

But not all of us wish to be slaves. Some of us are dangerous because we think for ourselves rather than blindly trust our hijacked and fascist governments.

Dr. Paul should be dangerous to those in power who fear justice and truth and hate to see the U.S. constitution restored. He is a rebellious, moral, and courageous American with a huge global following. It is obvious why such a remarkable man is unfairly smeared as a racist, isolationist, and conspiracy theorist.

But he is none of these things. Dr. Paul is a genuine American hero and revolutionary, not a dangerous racist.

The new world order cabal’s only option against Dr. Paul is a smear campaign. They are out of bullets. They have to wage a useless media war and try in vain to neutralize him by destroying his good name because it would not look well if the shadow CIA assassinated him.

But since everybody anticipated the media onslaught against Dr. Paul after the ludicrous media blackout, it has not been effective. There is no surprise element in the newsletter-racism smear. 2012 isn’t an exact repeat of 2008. The tricks and smears have lost their poisonous sting. The American people have not been swayed by the media’s hateful and dishonest smear campaign against Dr. Paul.

Dr. Paul has what puppet Obama and the Republican retards do not: the love of the American people. Yes, love. It is a powerful force in politics. Don’t underestimate a people’s love for a good, old doctor who has the best interests of his country, and humanity, at heart.

In a sane and normal world, Ron Paul should be awarded a Nobel Peace prize for his tireless efforts to build a strong bridge of friendship and respect between America and the rest of the world.

But we don’t live in a sane and normal world. We live in an insane and abnormal world, that’s why evil warmakers like Barack Obama are given Nobel Prizes while peacemakers like Ron Paul are smeared as racists, isolationists, and conspiracy theorists.

It is a shame that the liars and sycophants in the American state media are attacking the only man in the 2012 presidential race who desires to save America from national bankruptcy and a catastrophic world war in the Middle East.

But we should not be mad at these media maggots. Petty pawns do not deserve our righteous anger. Our fight for freedom and peace is against the evil eye of power, not the worthless and shameless scum who are slaves to it.

Ron Paul and the Future of American Foreign Policy
The Paul-haters won’t succeed

by Justin Raimondo
"Between government in the republican meaning, that is, constitutional, representative, limited government, on the one hand, and Empire on the other hand, there is mortal enmity. Either one must forbid the other, or one will destroy the other. That we know. Yet never has the choice been put to a vote of the people."

Garet Garrett had been an editor of the Saturday Evening Post, a financial writer for the New York Times, a renowned author and journalist of the "roaring Twenties," an intransigent opponent of the New Deal, and sometime novelist: his career spanned the era of Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, and Truman. In those days his was the voice of mainstream conservatism, albeit of a sort alien to the Newt Gingriches and Charles Krauthammers of this world, and he wrote the above cited words just as the US was embarking on its postwar crusade to save the world from Communism.

He had lived through the previous holy war against the Axis powers, witnessed the demise of the Old America and the rise of the Welfare-Warfare State, and saw – even then – that the country would face ruination if the crusading spirit prevailed over the need for self-preservation. He saw what would happen if we acquired an empire and sought to remake the world in our image. He annoyed his fellow libertarian, the novelist and ideologue Rose Wilder Lane, with his "keening" note of pessimism, which mourned "a world forever lost." Lane was sure the "world revolution" of freedom was coming, yet in those dark days when the spirit of freedom was seemingly forgotten it looked as if her friend Garrett was right.

Garrett died in 1954, a few years after the publication of his prescient essay: Rose followed him in 1968. Neither got to see the rise of a movement that would take the former's insights and the latter's optimism and forge a new path – and a new hope – for lovers of liberty. But I like to think they are still hovering over us, delighted at the success of their intellectual heirs, who today call themselves libertarians. No doubt they are buoyed by the success of presidential candidate Ron Paul, whose thrilling ascent in Iowa and beyond is redeeming Lane's optimism – and Garrett's hope – that the choice between empire and our old republic will – finally – be put to a vote of the people.

Paul's success – he is currently the frontrunner in Iowa, although the "mainstream" media is doing its best to downplay the numbers – has provoked an outburst of hysteria and pure hate from the War Party. Iowa, they declare, will be rendered "irrelevant" if Paul wins: Joe McQuaid, the bombastic editor of the neocon Union-Leader, rants that "Ron Paul is a dangerous man." How is that? Well, you see, Paul agrees with the overwhelming majority of Americans who don't think the Iraq war – which McQuaid and his tabloid supported – was worth the costs in lives and taxpayer dollars. Paul's anti-interventionist foreign policy views, says the would-be New Hampshire kingmaker, "have been largely overlooked by a news media more interested in the presidential 'horse race' than in the candidates' positions on issues."

McQuaid is getting on in years, and so probably doesn't get out much: while he is railing about the media's inattention to what he considers to be Paul's mortal sin, virtually every article assessing Paul's chances since the beginning of the campaign season has harped on precisely this theme. Paul's appeal is necessarily "limited" due to this: there is a "ceiling" on his support, they aver. As he began to climb in the polls, and this "ceiling" began to lift, the punditocracy declared that Iowa is passé, irrelevant, and an archaic tradition which ought to be ignored from now on by Those In The Know: Gail Collins gave voice to the New York-Washington axis when she sniffed that we ought to "feel free to ignore Iowa," because "in some rural districts, the entire caucus will consist of one guy named Earl." That she wouldn't dare say that if Earl lived in, say, the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn – where plenty of Earls reside, to be sure – underscores the bigotries our elites allow themselves, these days. In the world of Ms. Collins, some Earls are more equal than others.

The alleged dissonance between Paul's anti-interventionism and the frothy-mouthed militarism that has been Republican gospel ever since Robert Taft was cheated out of the GOP presidential nomination by the party's Wall Street wing – (see Phyllis Schlafly's classic A Choice, Not An Echo, p. 52, for a recap of the Eastern Establishment coup) – has been the constant theme of these pieces, written by youngsters with no understanding or knowledge of history. The one exception, oddly, was John Nichols in The Nation, a liberal-progressive periodical not known for its devotion to libertarianism, who recalled the history of the Old Right in his perceptive piece about the intellectual roots of the Paul campaign. McQuaid, for his part, neither knows nor cares about the history of the conservative movement he presumes to advise: he gets his "conservative" gospel from other sources. He cites Dorothy Rabinowitz's darkly threatening characterization of Paul as "the best-known of our homegrown propagandists for our chief enemies in the world. One who has made himself a leading spokesman for, and recycler of, the long and familiar litany of charges that point to the United States as a leading agent of evil and injustice, the militarist victimizer of millions who want only to live in peace."

He left out the part about Paul being a "propagandist for our enemies," perhaps because it was too much even for him. To the Rabinowitzes of this world – and the Gingriches, the Santorums, the Bachmanns, and the rest of that crazed crew – falls the solemn responsibility of determining the Enemy of the moment. Debate is limited, on this subject, to the question of which Enemy ought to be targeted at this particular point in time. Paul has broken this rule, and allowed that the main enemy – for those who want to limit the power of government, cut $1 trillion dollars from the budget, and emerge out of our economic morass – is in Washington, D.C., not Tehran.

This is literally treason in Rabinowitz's book, but then again that slim volume only contains several variations on a single theme: anyone who criticizes the regime of war and the constant erosion of our civil liberties is lacking in patriotism, and is quite possibly a "traitor," a "fifth columnist," a secret plotter against America and the supporter of its enemies – her enemies. In person – or, at least, on television – her bile is more acidic: here she compares Paul to Hitler and Mussolini while a panel of nattering neocons eggs her on.

One wonders what holds Rabinowitz back from calling for Paul's arrest as an "enemy combatant" – such restraint goes against the grain of her personal style. It is a style that has long since gone out of style, an echo of the bad old days of the Bush era, when the smoke had hardly cleared from the skies over Manhattan, and the country trembled at the commanding tone of the neocons as they accused war critics – "the decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts," as neocon tool Andrew Sullivan put it – of wanting to "mount a fifth column."

One of the most expected – and most welcome – developments of the primary campaign so far, from my perspective, has been Sullivan's withdrawal of his endorsement of Rep. Paul, after pressure from his friends on the Washington-New York cocktail party circuit and outraged emails from his dwindling fan club of gay waiters and sad young women who love only their cats. It's funny how everyone is howling that Paul must actively denounce and cast out any support from some white supremacist no one has ever heard of, but not a peep about the odiousness of an endorsement from someone who advocated, at the height of the post-9/11 hysteria, the launching of a nuclear attack on Iraq. Oh well, each to their own moral priorities.

Rabinowitz and McQuaid and the rest of the hate-mongers, who come up with a fresh Enemy every time we knock off the old one, or tire of the task, know who their real enemy is – and it isn't the President of Iran, or the Communist Party of China. It's those patriotic Americans who believe we ought to be putting the interests of Americans first – and that the empire is an albatross hung around our necks. It's the one-third of veterans who, according to a recent poll, think the Iraq war wasn't worth it: it's the majority of the American people who think we ought to pursue a policy of "minding our own business" abroad – these are the enemies Rabinowitz rails against. Paul is just a stand-in for the great Outer Wilderness that exists – so some say – outside the Washington-New York axis of power. That the great unwashed masses beyond this perimeter don't share the obsessions tormenting the Upper West Side of Manhattan and the Georgetown cocktail party circuit has been of little concern to Dorothy and her friends, the Cowardly Lions of the chickenhawk brigade and the Tin Woodsman a.k.a. Mitt Romney. Along with the scarecrows of the Fox News commentariat, together they've been marching down the yellow-brick road to war with Iran with nary an opponent to vilify. Suddenly they find themselves confronted by one who combines all their fears in a single convenient package: anti-interventionism (which they call "isolationism"), anti-elitism, and a well-organized and ideologically coherent movement targeting not only "big government" but the big financial interests, centered in New York, who profit from a system based on government debt.

The American empire – indeed, the entire colossus that is our bloated federal government – could not exist a single day without enslaving the American people to the demon of debt. The obvious beneficiaries [.pdf] are those collecting the interest on that debt – the big financial institutions that buy and sell US government securities. They finance the wars, they profit from government spending, and this is the essence of the real issue of "crony capitalism" some of the lesser Republican presidential candidates babble about without understanding or acknowledging that it isn't just Solyndra. That's small change compared to the massive theft being pulled off by the Federal Reserve as it inflates away our savings and enriches the few.

How do we pay for our overseas empire? The same way we pay for our burgeoning welfare state: by monetizing the debt, i.e. degrading the currency by creating "money" out of thin air, and inflating the bubble until it bursts again. This has been Paul's issue from the beginning, and it's a powerful one: it has substantially shaped the political discourse, with the other candidates forced to jump on board the anti-Fed bandwagon.

This is the Ron Paul Effect, and it has Dorothy and the War Street Journal running scared. Here is a conservative populist who is challenging their power, and in the very redoubt of neoconservative orthodoxy, the GOP! They who have always lived in fear of the rest of the country – in fear of the day those peasants with pitchforks gather in the streets below and yank them out of their Manhattan towers – are seeing in Paul their worst nightmare come true. That accounts for the spittle on Rabinowitz's cruel lips as she likens a gentle country doctor to the architect of the Holocaust.

It won't be long now before we hear baseless charges of "racism" and "extremism" supplemented by an overarching explanation for the Paulian phenomenon that echoes the clichéd "sociological" analysis of the neocons Richard Hofstadter and Seymour Martin Lipset, whose characterization of "pseudo-conservatism" as "status resentment" and "the paranoid style" given political form was an all-purpose smear, to be trotted out when liberal commentators were forced into discussions of conservatism. Conservatism, in this view, isn't an ideology so much as a mental affliction: Hofstadter and Co. were merely popularizing the Marxist theories of Theodore Adorno and the "Frankfurt School," who opined that opposition to FDR and the New Deal was evidence of a "father complex," the touchstone of "the authoritarian personality." Similar psycho-smears are deployed against Paul, who is said by his enemies to be a "crazy old uncle," "a crazy old codger," and a "crank," with neocon professional prig and "movie critic" Michael Medved calling him "Dr. Demento." This is the level of the "debate" the neocons want: prove you're not a crazy old Nazi!

Ron Paul published Gold, Peace, and Prosperity in 1981. What makes his pamphlet especially attractive today is the speed with which it can be consumed. A reader could get through his robust prose during an hour lunch break.

But why would a reader want to do that? Why not read one of Paul’s more recent books instead, even if it couldn’t be read in one sitting?

The answer is, the earlier work provides an excellent foundation for his later writings. It offers a clear, non-technical summary of his views on money and the economy.

Ron Paul has made his mark as an advocate of sound money. As such, he is totally opposed to fiat money and its imposition through the government-supported cartel, the Federal Reserve. It is largely through a hijacked monetary system that government has become a threat to civilization. In this pamphlet, Paul puts it all in perspective with everyday language, as if he’s talking to you – over lunch.

Sound money, he says, is money that is “fully redeemable.” The paper currency people use in transactions is only a substitute for money proper, which traditionally has been gold and silver coin. The adverb “fully” means that every note issued is a claim ticket to a specified weight of gold stored in a bank warehouse.

Why is this arrangement sound? Because it makes the value of money depend on the profitability of mining gold, rather than the “politics of the hour,” as Mises put it. A money that’s sound means the money supply remains relatively stable.

Unsound money is money that bankers and government can inflate virtually without limit. Unsound money equates “monetary policy” with varying degrees of inflation, as determined by a panel of politically-influenced bureaucrats.

Since inflation is indistinguishable in its effects from counterfeiting, the bureaucrats are simply counterfeiters with grandiose titles; their sacred monetary policy is nothing more than “legalized counterfeiting.” Inflation, Paul explains, citing Murray Rothbard, is “new money issued by the banking system, under the aegis of government.”

An increase in the money supply confers no social benefits whatsoever. It merely redistributes income and wealth, disrupts and misguides economic production, and as such constitutes a powerful weapon in a conflict society.

If inflation is so bad, why does it exist? Because it benefits “whoever gets the new money first” – government, bankers, and favored businesses.

A good example is the credit the government created to bail-out the Chrysler Corporation, largely to finance a labor contract that pays the employees twice the average industrial wage. But unions, like businesses, can only persuade government to inflate if the inflation mechanism is in place. A redeemable currency would make this impossible.

Who pays for inflation? The poor and middle classes, and those on fixed incomes. By the time they get the new money – if they get it at all – prices have gone up (or they’ve failed to drop, as they would have without inflation). These groups are cheated by inflation, and eventually are either wiped out through currency depreciation or made dependent on government favors. This pattern has been known for ages, as Paul shows with numerous historical references.

Expansion of the money supply through "spurious paper currency," noted [Andrew] Jackson, "is always attended by a loss to the laboring classes."

"Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind," added Daniel Webster, "none has been found more effectual than that which deludes them with paper money."

But if prices rise from an increase in the money supply, wouldn’t the price of labor go up, too? Quoting William Gouge, President Jackson’s Treasury advisor in 1833, Paul writes:

Wages appear to be among the last things that are raised. . . . The working man finds all the articles he uses in his family rising in price, while the money rate of his own wages remains the same.

When Lincoln issued greenbacks to pay for the Civil War, Paul notes, “prices rose 183%, while wages went up only 54%. During the World War I inflation, prices rose 135%, and wages increased only 88%. The same is true today.”

In answer to the claim that the Fed was created to prevent inflation and the periodic panics that erupted in the 19th century, Paul points out that inflation was written into the central bank’s founding charter, in the requirement to provide a more “elastic” currency. With the Federal Reserve Act of 1913,

a 40% gold cover for Federal Reserve notes and 35% for Federal Reserve deposits were required. The fact that it was not 100% showed that the central bankers planned more inflation. . . .

The central bank never set out to protect the integrity of our money. In fact, the Fed set out to destroy it by institutionalizing inflation. The gold coin standard was doomed and today's inflation made inevitable the day the Federal Reserve was created.

A gold coin standard, regulated by the market, acts as a restraint on inflation because it is the money, not the paper issued as a substitute. This is why governments hate gold – they can’t produce it in unlimited quantities. Using a non-redeemable paper currency avoids the risks of raising taxes while allowing politicians to pay for their wars and bureaucracies by running the printing press behind the curtain.

Since a gold standard enables the average person to restrain the government's attempts to inflate, control the economy, run up deficits, and fight senseless wars, the central planners had to eliminate this fundamental American freedom to own gold. This was accomplished with the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, which outlawed private ownership of gold, prohibited the use of "gold clause" contracts, and abolished the gold coin standard.

Thanks to Paul and others who support sound money, the government in 1974

reversed the unconstitutional 1934 law that barred private ownership of gold. In 1977, gold clause contracts were legalized.

One of my favorite passages in the book is Paul’s succinct comment on the Great Depression. Ben Bernanke wrote a collection of technical essays on the subject and has earned the reputation among his Keynesian colleagues as an expert on the Depression, never mind that he got it wrong. In 2002 he famously apologized to Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz for the Fed’s mismanagement of the money supply after the Crash, which he concluded could have been avoided if central bankers had provided “low and stable inflation” as a monetary background. (For an in-depth discussion of this episode, see Joseph Salerno’s Money, Sound and Unsound, Chapter 16, “Money and Gold in the 1920s and 1930s: An Austrian View”.) Applying the Austrian theory of the trade cycle, Ron Paul summarizes the Depression in 25 words:

Federal Reserve inflation during the 1920s, combined with economic interventionism by both Republican and Democratic administrations, caused and perpetuated the Great Depression of the 1930s.

One could hardly state the truth more concisely.

Many commentators are pointing out that the U.S. is declining into a police state, if it isn’t there already, but what some – especially the monetarists – overlook is the connection between honest money and freedom. For Ron Paul, freedom is “the ultimate justification for honest money.” And here he presents one of the most familiar quotes in libertarian literature, a non-Keynesian comment written by Keynes himself:

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and it does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

Ron Paul was one of those one-in-a-million many years ago. Sit down with him some lunch hour and see why.

In describing 2011, few cliches seem more appropriate. For in this past year, we Americans seemed to lose control of our destiny, as events seemed to be in the saddle.

While President Barack Obama maneuvered skillfully to retain a fighting chance to be re-elected, the economy showed no signs of returning to the robustness of the Reagan or Clinton years. And Obama is all out of options.

By January 2013, he will have added $6 trillion to a national debt that just earned America a downgrade on its AAA credit rating.

The nation hearkened to the tea party in 2010, giving the GOP 63 new seats in the House. But Republicans, too, have little to show for it, if their goal was reducing the deficit.

During 2011, the European Union was gripped by a crisis caused by a collapse in confidence that eurozone nations like Greece and Italy will be able to service their debts and a fear that they will default and bring down the European banks holding trillions of that debt.

Europe could plunge into a depression like the one in the 1930s, which would leap the Atlantic and cause a recession here that would spell the end of Obama's presidency.

Should the Greeks or Italians, chafing at the austerity imposed upon them and seeing no way out for years, choose to run the risk of bolting from the eurozone, the consequences could be catastrophic.

And, again, there is little Obama could do about it. Events in Europe could decide his destiny. The same is true in that most volatile region that engaged so much of America's attention in 2011.

With the withdrawal of all U.S. combat soldiers from Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has begun to attack his Sunni rivals, accusing his own vice president of instigating acts of terrorism.

A return to Sunni-Shiite sectarian war is a real possibility.

Should this occur, Obama would be savaged by Republicans for not negotiating to keep a U.S. force in Iraq. No Americans would be clamoring to send the troops back, but we would live with the consequences and they would poison our politics.

With the uprisings against the Arab autocrats, 2011 began as a year of hope. The Arab world, we were told, would be like Eastern Europe in 1989, with peoples marching to recapture God-given rights from despots who had misruled them for decades.

But the Arab Spring gave way to the Arab Winter. The Facebook-Twitter crowd enthralled the media, but when the lid of tyranny was lifted, older and deeper forces buried in the psyche of the nation rose to reveal their latent strength.

Undeniably, millions of Arabs wish to live in nations modeled on the West. But more, it appears, wish to live under regimes rooted in Islamic law.

We seem unable to appreciate that much of that world detests our culture, abhors our presence, loathes Israel and is as committed to Quranic absolutes as devout evangelical Christians are to biblical truths.

Our one-man, one-vote democratists who would remake the world in our image and whose ideology has guided foreign policy for the Bush-Obama decade failed to understand what our Founding Fathers taught:

A democracy, which they detested, empowers majorities to tyrannize minorities. "In questions of power," Jefferson admonished, "let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution."

Democratize the Middle East along one-man, one-vote majority-rule principles, without guarantees of minority rights, and majority tribes and sects will use their democratically won power to crush those minorities.

Is that not what is happening there today to the Christians of the Middle East?

The old influence we had over events in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Turkey, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is slipping away. Even the Israelis tell Obama they will build on the West Bank when they wish, where they wish.

China, beneficiary of a decade of trade surpluses running into the trillions at our expense, now instructs us that the South China Sea, East China Sea, Yellow Sea and Taiwan Strait are territorial waters – and the U.S. Navy shall behave accordingly.

Despite boasting a vast nuclear arsenal and the world's largest economy, America is perceived as weaker than she once was.

Though fighting for a decade, she is unable to impose her will on Iraq or Afghanistan. She cannot control her borders. She cannot balance her budgets. She cannot get her spending under control. She cannot stop the steady hemorrhaging of her jobs and factories overseas.

America is losing control. Why? A failure to understand human nature and the lessons of history – and the mindless pursuit of Utopian dreams.

We wagered the wealth of a nation on a Great Society gamble that through endless redistribution from top to bottom, we could create a more just, equal and productive society.

After the Cold War, we embraced the idea that using our immense power, we could remake this world into a more egalitarian, cooperative and democratic place.

Iowa’s Choice: Dr. Paul or U.S. Bankruptcy, More Wars, and Many More Dead Soldiers and Marines

by Michael Scheuer
Two recent experiences underlined for me what Iowans will vote for next week in the field of foreign policy if they do not vote for Dr. Ron Paul. On Christmas day, I heard Chris Wallace’s program on FOX. He had a guest – Mr. Charles Lane – who made the false and scurrilous claim that Dr. Paul’s foreign policy was the same as that of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s America-hating policy, a doctrine that appealed to Barack Obama for more than twenty years and which the president and his party are now implementing. Following this imbecilic assertion of Mr. Lane to its logical conclusion, U.S. soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines also must be ardent devotees of Rev Wright’s anti-Americanism as they donate many times more money to Dr. Paul than to all the other Republican candidates combined.

Then on 26 December, I visited Mount Vernon’s new and extraordinary multi-media museum documenting the life of George Washington. At the end of the exhibition there is video of U.S. Senators reading Washington’s Farewell Address into the record, something they appear to do every year. When I arrived in front of the video Senator John McCain was reading Washington’s clear warnings about the dangers of foreign intervention and the fatal impact of mindlessly favoring one country over another. To hear this from McCain’s interventionist, war-mongering, and Israel-is-always-right mouth was sound evidence of his hypocrisy and deceitfulness, as well as his and his senatorial colleagues’ ignorance of Washington’s ideas and U.S. history generally.

Based on these two experiences, let us look at what Iowans not voting for Ron Paul will help to inflict on an America already terribly wounded by the Republican and Democratic interventionism in the Muslim world.

1.) A foreign policy that will complete U.S. bankruptcy. While there is a lot of talk about cutting domestic spending to bring the federal debt under control, it is obvious that neither party is willing to make substantial cuts in that area. Indeed, both are counting on drastic cuts in defense spending to help reduce the federal debt. While they may agree on and even make defense-spending cuts, any such reductions will be short-lived and then restored to much more than current levels. Obama and any Republican save Dr. Paul will continue to intervene in the Muslim world and so will motivate more Muslims to fight us. A third-grader could tell you that you cannot cut defense spending when Washington’s unrelenting interventionism is cultivating new enemies who are intent on attacking U.S. citizens and interests. If you are being attacked, our third grader would patiently explain, you have to spend whatever it takes to defend yourself. And there is no doubt that we and our vital interests are going to keep being attacked by Islamists as long as we continue to intervene in their world.

2.) Obama’s return or the election of any Republican but Dr. Paul means the continuation of the State Department’s not-so-secret computer/Facebook/Twitter proselytizing campaign to incite people to overthrow their governments in places like Iran, Russia, Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere. [NB: Three offices of Mrs. Clinton’s elitist democracy/feminism crusade in Cairo were raided and shut by Egyptian authorities on 28 December 2011 for intervening in Egypt’s domestic affairs.] This mindless promotion of anarchy alienates the governments targeted and will motivate them to harm the United States in some manner. Of no concern to Obama, Mrs. Clinton, and Senators McCain and Graham, of course, are the thousands of young and naive people who will die at the hands of the regimes they are instigated to overthrow by the democracy-pushing federal bureaucrats and their elitist political masters, all of whom are safe and secure here in North America. Dr. Paul’s non-interventionist policy will allow foreigners to work out their political destiny in their own way and at their own pace; prevent unnecessary additions to America’s growing list of enemies; and save countless young lives.

3.) All the Republican contenders and the Obama administration are whole-hearted believers that the Arab Spring will bring the installation of secular democracy across that region. This has been and still is a nonsense that only adolescent idealists – or deliberate liars – could believe, and one that has been proven fatuous by the fact that Islamists have won every election held since the start of the Arab Spring. Neither the Obamaites nor the Republicans will admit they are wrong on this issue and they will pump billions of dollars in foreign aid into the Arab-Spring countries in a feckless, Muslim-alienating effort to build secular democracies and install the crazed feminism of Mrs. Clinton. Such aid not only will be wasted, but it surely will cause more Muslims take up arms against America. Indeed, the continuation of this bipartisan cultural/feminist war on Islam is likely to start the clash of civilizations Professor Huntington predicted.

4.) Electing anyone but Ron Paul will further increase the already strong chances of widespread Islamist-conducted violence inside the United States. Any other Republican candidate or a reelected Obama will keep lying to Americans by claiming that we are being attacked because of our liberties, gender-equality laws, and elections rather than because of Washington’s constant intervention in the Islamic world. This now two-decade-old lie – which is abetted by most of the media – has hidden from Americans the fact that all of the would-be Islamist attackers who have been captured in this country were motivated by the invasion of Iraq, U.S. support for Israel, or some other U.S. government action in the Muslim world. As Dr. Paul has explained, our Islamist enemies are motivated by Washington’s bipartisan foreign policy, and as long as that foreign policy does not change the number of young, U.S.-citizen Muslim males willing to attack their fellow citizens will keep increasing. For those who doubt this reality, a quick look at the recently adopted Defense Appropriations Act will clear their eyes. That Act’s authorization for the U.S. military to detain U.S. citizens in the United States is clear evidence that the leaders of both parties know that their foreign policy is going to bring war to America’s streets and towns and that the U.S. military will be called on to fight Islamists militants here at home.

5.) Obama and any Republican candidate, except for Dr. Paul, will slavishly obey the U.S.-citizen-dominated, pro-Israel lobby that bribes and suborns them by getting into a war with Iran. Indeed, Washington, Tel Aviv, and London are already conducting a lethal, covert-action war inside Iran which is killing Iranian nuclear scientists and destroying nuclear-related facilities, as well as trying to goad Tehran into reacting with violence and thereby give the West a casus belli. Such a war would be a financial and military disaster for the United States, and would be watched with glee by Russian and Chinese leaders who – while their countries would lose some trade with Iran during a war – would applaud another U.S. self-inflicted would that further erodes the already failing economy that is the base of American power. Moreover, if U.S. political leaders would not permit the U.S. military to defeat Afghan and Iraqi mujahedin armed with Korean War-vintage weapons, they surely will not allow the military to defeat a much better armed nation-state like Iran. Thus we would have yet another politically imposed defeat for the U.S. military. More painful for Americans will be the Iran-sponsored attacks that will occur in the United States if Washington and/or Israel launch a first strike on Iran. The only serious threat Iran poses to the United States is the result of more than 35 years of near-criminal bipartisan negligence by the U.S. executive and legislative branches in the fields of border control and domestic security. Both Iran’s military and intelligence services and their Lebanese Hizballah surrogate have created clandestine entry points along our southern border, as well as a large clandestine infrastructure in the continental United States, one which works with similar networks in Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Iran is too smart and fearful of U.S. military power to use this apparatus to strike first in North America, but the network clearly is meant to allow Tehran to respond violently here if Iran is attacked by America and/or Israel.

6.) While all of the Republican candidates and Obama talk about their plans to make America energy self-sufficient to the greatest extent possible, there is no reason to believe any of them. In the past 40 years, the two parties have made virtually no progress toward this goal, unless you count moving up Daylight Savings Time by three weeks as a major gain. Both parties have taken the easy and profitable route: dependence on oil-rich Arab tyrants, a policy that mandates that the U.S. military spends billions each year to defend the Arab Peninsula’s fundamentally anti-U.S. police states. Only Dr. Paul could be counted on to allow the unfettered development of all domestic energy resources to promote energy self-sufficiency and allow the gradual abandonment of our mujahedin- motivating exploitation of Muslim oil. But even Dr. Paul cannot prevent the United States from fighting an oil war that the Republicans and Democrats have fixed on the national agenda, one that America will wage in the Niger Delta region – from which we will soon get 20-25 percent of our crude – because of the Islamist insurgency that is gathering steam in Nigeria and threatening the oil-rich Delta region’s stability.

Notwithstanding the damnable lies about Dr. Paul’s foreign policy constantly proclaimed by his fellow Republican candidates, leading pro-Israel/pro-intervention U.S.-citizens and their journalist friends, and most of the media, only the gentleman from Texas speaks for the Founder’s non-interventionist vision of America’s role in world affairs and for plain common sense. In the Founders’ non-interventionist design for U.S. foreign policy that is championed by Dr. Paul, Iowans will find a proven road to the maintenance of America’s sovereignty, independence, peace, and prosperity. In the realm of common sense, Dr. Paul beats his fellow candidates, the Obamaites, and the media hands down. Dr. Paul challenges the interventionists in both parties on their plans for spreading secular democracy – and causing wars thereby – on historical grounds that are irrefutable because they are just good commonsense. We, the British, the Australians, and the Canadians have been building our republics/democracies since Magna Charta in 1215 – that is for nearly 800 years – and we are not yet quite perfect. If Iowans and all Americans truly think about what Dr. Paul is saying – and not what the interventionists say he is saying – they would respond favorably to the Texan’s logical conclusion that what we have not fully accomplished in eight centuries cannot possibly be attained in Egypt, Afghanistan, or elsewhere in the Muslim world in 6 weeks, 6 months, or six years, not least because none of those places separate church from state. Dr. Paul’s precise use of history and commonsense exposes the exorbitantly costly effort to build democracies in the Islamic world for what it is; namely, Washington throwing money down the drain for a cause that is impossibly lost from the start and one that will involve us in wars where we have no interests.

In the words of Dr. Paul’s Republican opponents, the Obamaites, and most of the media, on the other hand, Iowans ought to easily be able to hear the elitist, racist, and war-causing Wilsonian doctrine of intervening abroad to impose democracy and secular social beliefs on foreigners at the point of bayonets. Indeed, the national-security policy advocated by Dr. Paul’s opponents and critics boils down to the clear and absurd argument that: America needs more and more wars – and the dead/maimed military personnel attendant thereto – that are motivated by Washington’s intervention abroad if Americans are to be safe and secure at home.

For Iowans and Americans as a whole, then, the best choice for their children, grandchildren, and country clearly lies in the Founder’s foreign-policy wisdom and Dr. Paul’s sturdy advocacy and promised application thereof.

Madison Ruppert
There is something big brewing across the globe and it does not look good. India, Japan and Australia are strengthening trilateral ties while the United States and NATO are looking to firm up alliances between them all along with Ukraine and Armenia.

This comes soon after the United States announced they are going to place 2,500 Marines in Australia, in addition to cutting-edge fighter jets and transport planes, and Australia announced they are going to purchase $950 million in military equipment.

This is a large and quite complex picture that requires a great deal of reading and research and I recommend that everyone check out my sources and come to their own conclusions.

I can only speculate as to the purpose of these geopolitical developments and I would love to hear what my readers think as well so please email me if you care to share your analysis.

I will be going country by country and breaking down these latest developments in order to present to you the most complete information I can, but I am sure this is far more intricate than even I realize at this point.

India-Japan-United States

Japan is reportedly partially lifting their 40-year-long, self-imposed ban on arms trade which began in 1967.

The ban stated that they could not buy or sell arms in concert with nations that had Communist governments or nations at war.

Slowly, Japan ceased all military cooperation with every nation, aside from the United States of course.

This is seen as a move to not only expand military cooperation but also to allow for Japan to get in on the controversial European Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) project.

Despite the ban on a great deal of arms trade, in the 1980s Japanese corporations outfitted the United States with some 15 new technologies for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).

The SDI was proposed in 1983 by the President at the time, Ronald Reagan, and was derisively called “Star Wars” by the program’s many detractors.

Now, Japan, in a partnership with the Unites States, is in the process of creating a unit for a new, upgraded SM3 ship missile which is expected to become a key component in the European ABM system, according to the Voice of Russia.

The head of the Center for Japanese Studies, Valery Kistanov, said:

'Above all Japan wants to strengthen its military alliance with the US. Japan needs it amid current instability in the Asian Pacific region.

It is concerned about the so-called Chinese military threat and the situation on the Korean peninsula after the death of Kim Jong-il. The government’s recent move is probably intended to show that Tokyo is loyal and committed to its alliance with the US,' Kistanov added.

There is also the notable factor of a growing close cooperation between Tokyo and Brussels – the location of the headquarters of NATO – which would greatly contribute to a greater presence in the Asia-Pacific region.

This is just another instance of NATO mission creep far beyond what the alliance was originally intended to do, and as you will see, this is expanding to a disturbing degree just as we saw in the case of Libya.

Japan is also greatly strengthening ties between India, starting with a 2008 Joint Declaration on Security Cooperation which was modeled on a 2007 defense-cooperation accord with Australia.

This treaty later spawned a similar accord between India and Australia in 2009, leading to circular ties which are now developing into trilateral relations.

Japan is also reinforcing economic ties with India with a free-trade accord known as the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) which became active a mere three months ago.

CEPA covers over 90 percent of trade and even spreads into the sectors of services, rules of origin, intellectual property rights, investment, customs regulations and other related trade issues.

This agreement is intended to strengthen bilateral trade between the two nations in order to reduce trade with China, which still outweighs trade between Japan and India by a large margin.

According to the Japan Times, India is already becoming a preferred nation for Japanese foreign direct investment.

Japan and India have also come to an agreement on development of rare earths after China leveraged their monopoly on production of rare earths to cut off exports to Japan in the fall of 2010.

Japanese-Indian relations go even deeper with an annual summit meeting between the two prime ministers along with several annual dialogues between their respective foreign ministers, defense ministers, and Japan’s minister of economy, trade and industry and India’s commerce and industry minister.

There are also separate meetings between ministers of energy and other economic talks, dialogues between the Indian foreign and defense secretaries and the Japanese vice minister equivalents, a maritime security dialogue, comprehensive security talks and even military-to-military dialogues which include regular visits between the chiefs of staff of both nations.

To even further cement these relations, Japan, India and the United States have begun trilateral strategic talks which began in Washington just last week.

India and Japan already have their own missile defense cooperation agreements with Israel and the United States, but they are also looking to develop defense systems in cooperation with each other as well.

Despite the economic turmoil at home, the so-called leaders of America continue to pour astounding amounts of money into the Israeli missile defense program.

While Japan only has naval interoperability with the United States Navy, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in a speech in New Delhi, India that the aim should be that “sooner rather than later, Japan’s navy and the Indian navy are seamlessly interconnected.”

Japan is also planning on employing the F-35 next generation fighter jet, which was developed with nine nations including Britain and the United States.

The regulations against arms exports in place previously prevented Japan from joining the development team for the F-35, even though they were asked to join the project.

A remarkable article was published in Gulf News written by Jaswant Singh, who is the former Indian finance minister, foreign minister, and defense minister entitled, “New regional order in Asia is reaction to Chinese hegemony.”

I found this noteworthy due to the phrase “New regional order” which calls to mind the infamous “new world order” concept, which is quite an interesting choice of words indeed.

Speaking of the trilateral relations between India, Japan and the United States, United States Deputy Secretary of State William Burns said it could very well “reshape the international system.”

According to Singh, “Burns and much of the rest of America’s foreign-policy establishment, now thinks that India’s regional influence has become comprehensive,” although he is obviously coming from a highly biased perspective.

It is quite remarkable that Japan and India are now developing the same type of comprehensive military and economic ties that have so long been the hallmark of ties between the United States and Japan.

Singh erroneously claims that the newly formed trilateral alliance is also aimed at helping to mitigate the so-called “gaping hole” which will supposedly be left in the Asian security architecture after the West will remove troops from Afghanistan without establishing peace there.

Of course, this is outright absurd seeing as there is no indication that the United States or NATO will actually be leaving Afghanistan.

This became clear in November when the spokeswoman for the loya jirga in Afghanistan stated that Washington wanted a complete media blackout over the conditions being set in the new strategic long-term deal between American and Afghanistan.

Many of the loya jirga participants complained that they were not being provided with information about the terms and conditions of the long-term deal and Afghan President Hamid Karzai said that so long as some minor conditions were met they would be prepared to allow U.S. troops to remain in Afghanistan for an unspecified length of time.

One man covering Kabul and provinces for The New York Times, Sharifullah Sahak, said at the time via Twitter that “members with different views [are] saying [the] government should sign the strategic pact for 10, 20, even for 50 years with the US.”

It is quite clear that Singh is parroting the blatantly false line promulgated by NATO and the United States, despite all of the proof showing that they have no interest in leaving that theater.

Rick Rozoff of Stop NATO (which puts out a free daily newsletter that is an absolute must read for anyone trying to keep up with the diabolical geopolitical machinations going on every day) says the evolution and expansion of the so-called “Asian NATO” is nothing new.

In fact, he says that he has been writing for at least 10 years on this subject and yet these developments are generally ignored like far too many other important issues that impact us all.

Rozoff points to the fact that Europe was first brought “under the NATO boot” and having finished that has now moved on to the Middle East and Africa.

“Asia is the only ‘unsubjugated’ part of the world except for Latin America – which is being saved for ‘dessert,’” Rozoff said.

It is clear that Asia is the new focus, and this only becomes clearer as we continue to look at recent developments that the West is setting the proverbial sights on the Asia-Pacific region.

It has also become quite obvious to even the casual observer that this is aimed at encircling the countries that will not follow the West’s orders, most notably China, Russia and of course Iran.

During the recent visit of India’s Defense Minister A.K. Antony to Tokyo, it was decided that there would be a joint naval and air force exercise in 2012 between Japan and India, which would be a first.

This is part of the agreement between Japan and India which is aimed at increasing cooperation on “maritime security issues, including anti-piracy measures, freedom of navigation,” in addition to “maintaining the security of the Sea Lanes of Communication to facilitate unhindered trade, bilaterally as well as multilaterally with regional neighbors,” which Singh points out obviously means China.

In early 2012 a “Japan-India Defense Policy Dialogue” will be held in Tokyo along with the many top-level meetings between government and military officials as previously mentioned.

Singh says that these ties will certainly upset China while claiming that China’s role in the South China Sea dispute “has been a wake-up call about the type of regional order that China would establish if it had the power.”

Then again, the “new regional order” being established by NATO isn’t quite as glorious and peaceful as Singh is making it out to be, and the United States has been pretty clearly goading China in the South China Sea dispute.

“India’s and China’s rival aspirations to be acknowledged as regional Great Powers, as well as their quest for energy security, are compelling both countries to seek greater maritime security,” Singh writes.

Of course in this case “maritime security” is a not-so-subtle way of saying naval dominance as determined by the clout of alliances and sheer firepower.

Singh acknowledges the Indian approach has been opting “to construct a regional security structure with no Chinese participation,” and isolation isn’t quite the phenomenal strategy Singh seems to be making it out to be.

Cutting a nation out of the equation while encircling it and engaging in saber-rattling is bound to be disruptive, especially when the nation feels threatened.

This is exactly what we’re seeing right now with the NATO ABM program in Europe which is not leaving Russia either happy or reassured, as Rozoff has been extensively pointing out in his newsletters.

China is also not quite pleased with these developments, evidenced by China Daily saying that Japanese Premier Yoshihiko Noda’s visit to India was aimed at containing China.

They cite Lu Yaodong, the director of the department of Japanese diplomacy at the Institute of Japanese Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social sciences who says that the summit between India and Japan is a continuance of the Japanese strategy known as the “Arc of Freedom and Prosperity.”

They also point to an expected dollar swap accord worth up to $10 billion along with possible increased nuclear cooperation between the two nations.

Su Hao, the director of the Asia-Pacific research center at China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing reportedly said that Japan’s move to ease the arms trade restrictions “will complicate security in the Asia-Pacific region,” and thus “will have a negative effect on China,” according to the India Times.

There is also the concern that the Chinese People’s Daily Online reported on June 15, 2011 that the Liberation Army Daily said, “China resolutely opposes any country unrelated to the South China Sea issue meddling in disputes, and it opposes the internationalization of the South China Sea issue.”

This is a pretty clear statement to the United States who has been conducting naval exercises with nations involved in the dispute, arming others and encircling China with their increasing Japanese, Indian and Australian ties.

It is also worrisome that Australia has decided to sell natural uranium to India, which is a total reversal from the previous policy which had been in place since India had first developed a nuclear weapons program.

The Australian Greens characterized this “unethical, illogical and probably illegal,” pointing to the fact that India is not a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, although I think we all know just how much treaties are worth these days.

This comes as there is significant opposition to Indian nuclear power, including hunger strikes and the Australian Senator for Western Australia Scott Ludlam said that “selling uranium to India will increase the proliferation of nuclear weapons in our region.”

Ludlam also cites the former head of the Indian National Security Advisory Board K. Subrahmanyam who said, “It is to India’s advantage to categorize as many power reactors as possible as civilian ones to be refueled by imported uranium and conserve our native uranium fuel for weapons grade plutonium production.”

It is quite clear that uranium sold to India will just replace other uranium which would go to civilian nuclear programs so more uranium can be devoted to weapons-grade plutonium production and thus nuclear weapons.

Ludlam also said that even the Indian civilian nuclear program was considered dangerous, pointing out, “This trade is illegal, dangerous and opposed by many Indian people including nuclear experts.”

This issue dovetails with the concern over America’s new and quite pronounced military presence in Australia, which in combination with the nuclear proliferation is sure to make China a bit concerned.

There is also the matter of Australia purchasing some $950 million in military equipment from the United States.

The Defense Security Cooperation Agency informed the U.S. Congress earlier in December that Australia will be purchasing 10 C-27J military planes and other equipment like missile warning and radar systems.

Washington approved the sale which is being done under the guise of helping “improve the air mobility and capability of the Australian Defence Force to run humanitarian and disaster relief operations in Southeast Asia,” according to the International Business Times.

They point out that the United States will also be opening a training center in Australia on top of the 2,500 Marines and the cutting edge F-22 fighter jet capable of cyberwarfare and electronic warfare, along with other military hardware, all of which will supposedly “help U.S. allies and protect American interests in Asia.”

Is this preparation for innocent humanitarian missions like they claim? Or, could it possibly be building up supplies for a greater encirclement and possible future military action?

The Philippines

The Filipino Presidential Communications Operations Office announced on December 26 that the Gregorio del Pilar (PF-15) set out from Manila to the province of Palawan on December 23 for her first deployment as a warship of the Philippine Navy, after being handed over by the U.S. Coast Guard on May 13, 2011.

The Philippine Navy said that the vessel will act to strengthen the naval security in the Malampaya Oil Fields along with other areas west of the Palawan province.

The Malampaya field is roughly 80 km off the coast of Palawan Island, which Is not too far from the South China Sea as you can see in the following map where “A” is the South China Sea and “B” is Palawan Island.

While there very well might be closer areas to the South China Sea in the Philippines, the newest patrol frigate can sustain a month-long mission without any need to re-provision and is 378 feet long with a beam of 42 feet.

The ship carries 18 officers and 144 enlisted personnel and thus represents yet another aspect of the expansion and encirclement in the region thanks to the United States.

Ukraine

According to the KyivPost (Kyiv is an alternate spelling of Kiev), Ukraine hopes that the upcoming NATO summit in Chicago in May of 2012 will strengthen ties between NATO and Kiev.

They cite Oleh Voloshyn, the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry’s information policy department director, who said, “We very much hope that next year’s NATO summit in Chicago will be an impetus to the deepening of cooperation between Ukraine and the alliance.”

Voloshyn also said that Ukraine and NATO have been engaging in intensified dialogues this year in a clear effort to bring the Eastern European nation into the alliance to further encircle Russia and China.
“Of course, we will continue to see NATO as our strategic partner in the sphere of security, reform of the armed forces, and in the sphere of tackling the consequences of emergency situations,” Voloshyn added.

The KyivPost adds that the United States Ambassador to Ukraine John Tefft said that the Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych, would also be invited to attend the NATO summit in Chicago in May.
Bringing Ukraine into NATO could be a huge boon for those seeking to further encircle Russia and continue to grow the hegemonic Western control as Ukraine is a relatively large nation which shares a border with Russia.

Armenia

According to Public Radio of Armenia, recently the interdepartmental commission which was coordinating the implementation of the Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP) between Armenia and NATO held their final meeting in 2011.

While Armenia does not border Russia, it is quite close and would provide yet another way to encircle Russia and strengthen NATO’s grip on the region.

Ashot Hovakimyan, the Armenian Deputy Foreign Minister lauded the effectiveness of the interdepartmental commission’s activity over the past year in presenting the general assessment of their actions.

Armenia’s First Deputy Defense Minister David Tonoyan said that the main areas of cooperation with NATO in the field of defense would be the participation of Armenian so-called peacekeepers in NATO actions along with support from NATO and member states in implementing defense reforms.

During the final sitting the results of the implementation of the objectives of IPAP in 2011 were summarized along with the progress they had made towards expanding the cooperation between Armenia and NATO.

If nothing else, this much is clear: NATO and the West are expanding far beyond their original stated intentions when NATO was created, and are now moving into new regions, expanding ties and military dominance, and overall doing whatever it takes to grow the hegemonic control of the world.

The direction this is heading is far from pleasant, and despite the constant reassurances that this is being done for humanitarian purposes or motivations that seem otherwise innocent, I think by now all of my readers realize this is very unlikely, to say the least.

So I am a blogger now.

This is my entry into the world of blogging. Don't know if anyone will ever see it or care, but here it goes. I intend it be a humorous, music, sports and current issues flavored site with postings of links to my favorite videos, info about my favorite bands, stuff I find funny and things I find newsworthy. It might become political at times. I just can't help myself. I will also use this as a forum to put things out there for information and education sake. I like to expose people to alternative ways of viewing events both past and present. I never believe everything I read and don't claim to have all the answers despite what many of you who know me believe. Hence the title of my blog. I hope you enjoy it and feel free to pass on any comments.

Disclaimer:

Many of the articles I post here are taken from some of my favorite alternative news sites and blogs. I do my best to post the link to the the source of the original article as well as the author's name if it is provided. If someone notices any omission on my part or feels that they would prefer that I not post their articles here, please contact me. I try to post the work of others in bold and italics. My comments or any work that is original to me, is presented in regular type format. My intention is to pass on information I find interesting or important to others for informational and/or educational value. Again, if someone wishes that I not use their work, please contact me. I will gladly remove it and refrain from posting it in the future.